Bari Weiss, the New York Times columnist turned independent newsletter writer, has hired 10 full-time employees and over a dozen contractors to help build her new media company, The Free Press, Weiss told Axios in an interview.

Driving the news: Weiss launched The Free Press last Thursday, four days ahead of schedule, to capitalize on the media coverage around her "Twitter Files" reporting.

• 🐦 In less than a week, The Free Press has accrued more than 105,000 followers on Twitter and its flagship newsletter has added an additional 25,000 free and paid subscribers.
• Weiss' Twitter following itself has exploded in that time, growing from more than 500,000 followers to more than 900,000 in less than a week.

Weiss and her wife, Nellie Bowles, a co-founder of The Free Press and former New York Times correspondent, have wasted no time supercharging growth.

• The company has already begun its first paid marketing campaign, which includes digital advertising and posters across major U.S. cities.

Catch up quick: Weiss left the New York Times as an op-ed columnist in July 2020, arguing she had become a victim of a "'new McCarthyism' that has taken root at the paper of record." Bowles left the Times shortly after in 2021.

By the numbers: Last year, Weiss launched Common Sense, a newsletter on Substack that's since amassed over 283,000 free and paid subscribers. (Common Sense has now been rebranded as The Free Press.)

• MarketWatch reported in August 2021 that Weiss made over $800,000 from her newsletter alone, which at the time had 14,000 paid subscribers.
• The newsletter has more than double that number of paid subscribers today.

💰 Be smart: Earlier this year, Weiss and Bowles raised a small friends and family funding round for The Free Press. Weiss declined to share how much was raised.

• Prior to that, the duo relied on subscription revenue from Weiss' newsletter, which costs $5 monthly. (It now costs $8 monthly under The Free Press umbrella.)

Of note: Weiss' newsletter and other Free Press email newsletters will continue to be sent using Substack, which also provided technical support for The Free Press website.

Details: Looking ahead, Weiss plans to launch a slate of newsletters and podcasts to accompany her own — all under the umbrella of The Free Press.

• She's hired several podcast producers, including Andy Mills, formerly a producer for the New York Times' flagship podcast "The Daily."

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The highly anticipated Avatar sequel "The Way of Water" is expected to dominate this week's box office when it hits theaters on Friday, 13 years after the original James Cameron Avatar film first debuted in December 2009, Axios' Tim Baysinger and I write.

🍿 Details: The movie is expected to bring in over $150 million+ domestically this weekend, per Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian, which would give it one of the best-performing weekend openings this year.

Yes, but: The film, which runs over three hours long, may not see late-night shows book up as quickly, Dergarabedian warned.

• There's little competition heading into the holiday season. The third installation of Disney's "Ant-Man" doesn't debut until February.

🇨🇳 Be smart: Unlike most Marvel films over the past two years, Avatar has had a Chinese debut date the same day it premiers domestically.

• Not only is overseas viewership expected to soar due to availability in China, but it will also be a boon to high-margin Imax and 3D ticket sales.

The big picture: The box office struggled to fully recover from the pandemic this year — even sending the second-largest operator into bankruptcy in September — but analysts are hopeful it will improve next year and beyond.

• Analyst Shawn Robbins of Boxoffice Pro told Axios he expects sales to improve with a more consistent release schedule and more family-friendly content with theatrical appeal.
• The box office is currently down 34.4% from this time in 2019.

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Shares in BuzzFeed dipped to a new low of 95 cents yesterday, just a week after the firm announced 12% staff cuts that impacted roughly 180 staffers, Axios' Kerry Flynn and I write.

Why it matters: Trading low consecutively could put BuzzFeed at risk of possibly being delisted from the Nasdaq.

Details: If BuzzFeed trades at less than $1 for 30 consecutive business days, it starts a long process that includes the Nasdaq sending a deficiency notice and offering a compliance period of 180 calendar days.

• Audacy, the audio giant formerly known as Entercom, was warned of a similar risk of being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange in August. It's traded below $1 since July and has not recovered.
• BuzzFeed did not respond to a request for comment.

Yes, but: It's not just BuzzFeed. Tech and media stocks have been performing poorly this year amid rising interest rates and an ad market slowdown.

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Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency trading firm secretly funded The Block, a news site that purported to cover the crypto world independently.

• 🏠 One $16 million batch of funding was used in part to purchase an apartment in the Bahamas for The Block's CEO Michael McCaffrey, according to sources familiar with the transactions.
• LLCs controlled by McCaffrey received three loans from Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried's trading firm, totaling more than $40 million.

The fallout: Employees of The Block were previously unaware of the payments and are livid now that they've found out — especially as they continue to cover the repercussions of FTX's collapse.

🪙 The big picture: The saga highlights the need for media companies to disclose their backers.

• Several other news outlets, including Semafor, ProPublica, Vox Media and The Intercept, have all taken money from Bankman-Fried, but have disclosed their backing.
• Grants to ProPublica have been put on hold. Semafor said it intends to let the various government agencies that are still in the early stages of investigating SBF and the FTX saga to decide "how best to handle his interest in Semafor."

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Former CNN boss Jeff Zucker was officially named the head of a new joint venture between RedBird, a private investment firm, and International Media Investments, a UAE-based fund with minority stakes in Euronews, Sky News Arabia and others.

• Zucker is the CEO of RedBird IMI and has also joined RedBird as an operating partner to lead investments in global media and entertainment properties.

The Wall Street Journal named Emma Tucker as its new editor-in-chief on Monday, succeeding Matt Murray.

• 🇬🇧 Tucker hails from the U.K., where she most recently served as the editor of The Sunday Times. She's the first woman to lead the paper's newsroom, but not the first outsider brought in by the Murdochs to lead WSJ.

Twitter's revamped subscription service relaunched Monday following a chaotic first attempt several weeks ago.

What's new: The revamped "Twitter Blue" subscription will be more expensive, costing $8 a month for those who sign up via Twitter's website and $11 for those who do so via the iOS app, to cover Apple's cut, per Axios Login author Ina Fried.

• Paying users will get blue check marks after a more thorough verification process, which requires accounts to have a unique cellphone number and a photo.

The big picture: The product revamp comes amid escalating tensions between Twitter and the advertising community.

• Twitter disbanded its Trust and Safety Council yesterday as part of a wider effort to roll back content moderation policies from Twitter's former administration.

Around the globe, 375 journalists remain behind bars, according to new data from the International Federation of Journalists, up from 365 last year and 235 in 2020.

• China and Hong Kong top the list again this year, with 84 journalists jailed.

Driving the news: Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai was sentenced to more than five years in prison Saturday, after being found guilty of two fraud charges in October.

• Lai was found guilty of violating a lease contract for the headquarters of the pro-democracy newspaper he founded, the now-defunct Apple Daily.
• The paper, which sold 1 million copies in its final edition last June, was forced to shut down after its assets were frozen under China's national security law.

The big picture: The number of journalists jailed globally has ballooned as more autocrats impose "fake news" laws designed to silence the press.

Disney on Thursday rolled out a new ad-supported plan for its flagship streaming service Disney+, roughly one month after rival Netflix also debuted a cheaper ad-supported tier.

• In an interview, Rita Ferro, Disney's president of advertising sales and partnerships, told Axios the company will not accept ads from competitive movie studios or "tune-in" promotional ads from competitive media companies at launch. The company will not accept political or alcoholic beverage ads to start.
• Those decisions were made, in part, because narrow ad targeting won't be available to start, Ferro said. Some of those categories would need to be targeted to the appropriate audience to create an acceptable consumer experience.

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Nominations for the 80th Golden Globes were announced Monday. “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a dark comedy from Searchlight Pictures, led the pack with eight nominations.

Why it matters: The Globes are typically a litmus test for major movies ahead of the Oscars, but scrutiny over its lack of representation in the past pulled the show from the airwaves last year.

• The Globes return to NBC on Jan. 10.

Go deeper: Full list of nominees